


Five things Fai reveals to Kurogane (but not to 'the children')

by kittu9



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: 5 Things, Body Language, Gen, Gen Fic, everyone probably has PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-06
Updated: 2011-08-06
Packaged: 2017-10-22 07:26:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/235472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/kittu9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The magician has a really sobering number of tells, even if Kurogane is the only one who can read them.</p><p>Written for Berrygold in September 2006.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five things Fai reveals to Kurogane (but not to 'the children')

1.

The lanky magician throws back his head and laughs like a dying crane. Kurogane feels the small hairs along the back of his neck stand at attention at the sound; he is the only one to have noticed how Fai’s eyes have half-lidded themselves with something that is very far from humor.

Unconsciously (or, so consciously that it has become a natural movement, instinctual), Kurogane lays his hand to his sword and checks the bindings. There are some sounds that men must never make, he remembers learning in his time at the temple. These utterances denote a loosening grasp on the world before them.

(Kurogane knows first-hand. He himself has heard that sound before, spilling out of his own throat.)

 

2.

Fai looks at the princess with genuine fondness: he slouches a little, meets her eyes, allows himself to lean in her general direction, reaches out to hold her small hand. It’s as if she reminds Fai of someone or something he left behind in his home country, something good (even in his cheerful babbling, inconsequential, one realizes that there was very little happiness to be had there). The first time Fai did smiled at her—really smiled, not one of his scare-crow grins--Kurogane noticed some shock in the other man’s eyes, as if he was surprised by his own actions, and a little worried.

 

3.

Fai holds himself loosely, but he’s so tense that being around him for too long makes Kurogane’s jaw clench and ache; it’s that palpable.

 

4.

There’s something about him—the moon-magic, perhaps, Fai seems to have been steeped in it, snow and ice and all that barren wilderness that Souma used to mutter on about whenever they shared guard duty—that reminds Kurogane deeply of Princess Tomoyo, in a way that perturbs.

It is a familiarity with despair, a good-natured mystery that hovers about the edges of hysteria. Kurogane’s princess had—has—the same haunted look about her when she presided over temple matters, or saw the body of a murdered child (Kurogane still seethes about that incident; he ought to have gotten her away faster, and damned her orders. There are some things he never wants her to have to witness, despite what she has already known). Disturbed, yes—but a well-known horror, one that is no longer born of shock.

Tomoyo carries that look about her person like another layered kimono and Fai wears it with much of the same appalling grace: the knowledge of deep and terrible things, a void one has met and been altered by, irrevocably.

 

5.

Fai lies the way most men breathe, fluently. Kurogane isn’t sure yet if the magician is proud of this or not, but Fai nurses the ability like a sick child (he nurses it like he nurses the kid and the princess, the way Kurogane nurses alcohol or Tomoyo’s absence).

It’s unsettling, knowing that something is going on inside that strange head of his (something besides the wind blowing), but what angers Kurogane more is that Fai is so used to deception now that he doesn’t notice it anymore, and it’s going to get them all killed.

**Author's Note:**

> I gave up on reading TRC probably in October? of 2006, so if there are any raging issues you think ought to be corrected, please let me know.


End file.
